The Campus Gallery
Georgian’s Campus Gallery is a vibrant multi-disciplinary exhibition space where students in Design and Visual Arts programs and established artists showcase their work. The Campus Gallery hosts a variety of exhibitions and artist talks that reflect regional, national and international art, craft and design.
On this page:
Exhibitions
An Alternative to Simplicity
An Exhibition by Z’otz* Collective
Nahúm Flores, Erik Jerezano, Ilyana Martínez
September 18 to October 19, 2025
- Opening reception: Thursday, September 18, from 5 to 7pm.
About the exhibition
The Campus Gallery exhibition An Alternative to Simplicity, welcomes viewers into the worlds of Z’otz* Collective. Founded in 2004, artists Nahúm Flores, Erik Jerezano, and Ilyana Martínez create site-specific installations with drawing, painting, sculpture, and animation to consider the role of transformation: both in space and within their collective creative process. Informed by their Latin American heritage, mythology and narrative, and a playfully collaborative investigation of the vast approaches to mark-making, the gallery will be the canvas for their stories and gestures to emerge.
This exhibition is in partnership with The City of Barrie’s Culture Days.
Art Crawl with The MacLaren Art Centre in connection with The City of Barrie’s Culture Days initiative: Thursday October 2 10am start at The Campus Gallery,
An Alternative to Simplicity invites us to consider how identities are shaped in relation, how communities are carried on through stories, and how art becomes a living testament to the power of creating together. Within Z’otz* Collective’s work, we are reminded that to be transformed is also to belong.
– Katie Anglin, Curatorial Essay
Z’otz* Collective was established in Toronto in 2004. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The artists first experimented with clay in a residency in Serbia. Since then, they have integrated ceramic sculptures into their practice, which also includes large-scale drawing installations and animation. This summer they had a solo exhibition at Varley Art Gallery of Markham. The Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art invited them to participate in a residency to produce work for a solo exhibition in 2022. In conjunction with Art Windsor-Essex, the Collective led drawing workshops with migrant agricultural workers, in a greenhouse in Leamington, Ontario.
The Collective has created over 45 in-situ ephemeral drawing installations. They have had more than 30 solo and 40 group exhibitions in museums, galleries and artist-run centres in Canada, Mexico, USA, Serbia, and China. The group has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
About the gallery
Location
The Campus Gallery is located in room 140, D building (Helen and Arch Brown Centre for Design and Visual Arts) at the Barrie Campus, Georgian College, 1 Georgian Drive.
Hours of operation
Effective Sept. 21:
- Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Saturday to Sunday, noon to 4 p.m.
For more information, please contact us.
The Campus Gallery objective and mandate is to deliver a diversity of visual to the City of Barrie, its immediate region and within the Georgian College campus community.
The exhibitions celebrate emerging, mid-career and established artists, designers and craftspersons, as well as students within post-secondary arts education. The Campus Gallery will support the exhibition objectives with informative artist lectures that will be open to the immediate community, high schools and the college community, thus creating an environment of critical thinking, insight and appreciation.
Through outreach and exchange, the Campus Gallery will host and present international exchange exhibitions and lectures as well as exhibitions of community outreach at our partner venues. We exhibit our significant collection and bring visual arts to distinctly different audiences, facilitating and encouraging a dialogue and awareness of the arts in our community.
The Campus Gallery is committed to delivering a diverse program of exhibitions by visual artists, designers and crafts people to the Barrie and the Simcoe County arts community. A policy of inclusivity guides our programming, giving equal voice to emerging, mid career and senior artist with diverse practices.
The gallery space allows artists to realize special projects, surveys or retrospectives, and to see large groups of work together in an excellent facility, sometimes for the first time.
We are committed to furthering the knowledge of contemporary practice to the community with our on going artist lecture series, which has consistently featured insightful dialogue form the frontlines of creativity by exceptional regional, national and international artists.
The Campus Gallery identifies its exhibition roster three years in advance and books its artist lecture series on a yearly basis. We provide a diversity of visual arts programming to the community and continue to foster an environment of learning, engagement and dialogue in the visual arts which is only available in one other Barrie location.
The Campus Gallery provides a laboratory space for our Museum and Gallery Studies graduate certificate students to engage with artists, the campus collection, and to develop programming in locations outside of the gallery, based on the Campus Gallery Collection. This offsite programming allows us to bring unique, contemporary art to an even more diverse audience, creating another level of dialogue, awareness and engagement.
Over the past years, we have partnered with the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH), Five Points Theatre (formerly The Mady Centre for the Performing Arts) and the Barrie Courthouse to create exhibition space and thoughtful, unique programming from some of over 2,500 works in the Campus Gallery collection.
The Georgian College Art Collection holds over 5,000 diverse artworks of local, regional, and international significance. The collection has grown over the span of 50 years, as artists have crossed paths with the college’s Design and Visual Arts Department and contributed artworks. The artworks are preserved and displayed in college offices, libraries, and The Campus Gallery, as well as in community venues. The collection space also acts as a learning environment for students of the Museum and Gallery Studies program.
Art from the Georgian Collection Collection can currently be viewed at the Royal Victoria Hospital David McCullough Hearts and Minds Gallery “Healing through Art: Nature’s Comfort” featuring paintings by Christina Luck and curated by students in the Museum and Gallery Studies program. On view until early June 2024.
“Hidden Gems” features art from the Georgian College Collection is on view at The First Floor Gallery at City Hall in Barrie, curated by Collections Assistant, Yasmeen Kazak. On view until mid-June 2024.
Contact us
If you have questions or require more information, please email Amy Bagshaw, Director, The Campus Gallery.